381–390 of 401 posts
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You’re giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the dictatorship. Establishing complete control over emerging power structures (tech industry) is more likely to be their goal.
In my eyes China is a technocratic autocracy, not a dictatorship. This would explain the hypothesis why they want their brains to work on rockets rather than ad tech, as OP assumed.
> There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they rake in; maybe China’s leaders, for reasons that will remain forever opaque to us, have simply reached the same conclusion. Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue fr…
> Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value. And where is that happening? It's not happening in the US, China or Europe. The ad tech segment would be luc…
In Germany, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon compete for CS, electrical, and mech eng students with BMW, Daimler, Audi, Airbus, etc.
These classical engineering companies can't compete with FAANG salaries here. The top of my class had offers from many of them, but they all ended up in FAANG, because the salaries were 2x what the others were offering, with larger room to grow.
> The best talent at Google are not even working on ad tech.
Improving web server performance, source control tools, etc. at, e.g., Facebook, is not "working on ad-tech" per se, but rather work on the infrastructure that supports ad tech.
Arguably, working on "traffic in Google maps" is not working on "ad tech", but rather working on adding value to an app so that it can serve more ads, etc.
> Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Regeneron, Moderna, Biogen, Gilead, AbbVie, Abbott, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly, Illumina, Intuitive Surgical, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Cisco, Qualcomm, Micron, LAM, KLA, Applied Materials, SpaceX, Tesla, Caterpillar, Honeywell, DuPont, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, 3M, Boston Scientific, Stryker, Edwards Lifesciences, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Monsanto.
I work at FAANG. Many in my team are "aerospace engineer", "structural engineer", "civil engineer", "electrical engineer", "astrophysicist", "chemist", "mathematician", etc.. All top of their class, now doing CS, working "indirectly" on ad-tech.
That does not mean that the companies above fail to attract good engineers. But most people in my team, including myself, had to choose between working at any of the top firms for engineering in our "field", or going to FAANG to do CS and work (directly or indirectly) on ad tech.
One new hire recently was doubting between working here at FAANG or at SpaceX, and at the end, after being a bit burned out from their PhD, they decided they preferred to work at FAANG on ad-tech because: n-times more salary, for a fraction of the hours.
> That's a super short list that instantly destroys the claim
The claim is that normal companies can't compete with FAANG for top talent.
I don't see how the fact that normal engineering companies can find engineers debunks that claim.
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When it's out of alignment, usually it's because of regulatory capture.
Not always. Tobacco generated enormous profits even when there was no regulatory heat on it.
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When it's out of alignment, usually it's because of regulatory capture.
> When it's out of alignment, usually it's because of regulatory capture. No. The GGP's examples are a direct counterexample to that idea. Being a little more general: based on past experience, I interpret general complaints about "regulatory capture" without further clarification as complaints about regulation in general and advocacy for "market solutions" as an alternative. However, a poorly regulated market will a…
> a poorly regulated market will almost certainly result in a great many monopolies
A market regulated in poorly thought through ways can certainly lead to monopolies. But monopolies specifically are almost entirely due to regulatory capture. Case in point internet service in the US is almost always given either a de facto monpoloy or a straight up legislated monopoly for a particular area. That's why internet service in the US sucks so much. Countless regulatory burdens on businesses are designed to favor large companies, and is one of the many regulatory reasons that companies merge so often and industries in the US are oligopolies.
And that's not to mention the actual government run monopolies like utilities and the post office. It was despicable that the post office killed Outbox and prevents people from using their own mailboxes however they want. https://smallbiztrends.com/2014/05/usps-killed-outbox-mail.h...
If the US had good representation, maybe the regulations it creates would generally benefit the consumer rather than entrenched business interests. Unfortuantely, that's not really the case today.
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The example I'm aware of is that the toilet seats needed to be a specific shape to fit in a specific aircraft, and that they only needed 1XX of them. The $20,000 price tag is because they had to pay for molds, testing, various other fixed costs required to operate, etc.
You know some people got a blank check and went on a rampage. And if asked they invent justifications and requirements and generally fire smoke grenades to confuse the public.
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The actual reports discuss a range that’s unbelievably wide in terms of civilian casualties. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 to 1,000,000 which seems incredibly broad. The US did not deliberately engineer the situation in Iraq of course, and the insurgency, Sunni/Shea civil war that happened as well as Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters made the situation unmanageable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_o…
It doesn’t really matter whether the US planned to kill slightly fewer people. Everything that ensued was their fault; it wouldn’t happen without US invasion. Also, note that those numbers are only the direct victims. How many people died because of US sanctions? As for Uyghurs - I’m sure there were a lot of horrible crimes there. It’s unavoidable when doing things at that scale, in a country which still has a long w…
You must not understand that Iraq was like North Korea before the war, I suggest you read Christopher Hitchens on this as he puts how dark and evil Saddam’s regime was into some light.
You’re arguing both ways in your comments by the way, you say on the one hand America is responsible for all deaths perpetuated even by others because it created the situation for it to happen but when confronted with evil by the Chinese state you make out that individuals did it and it wasn’t intentional by the CCP. I think you have to understand if you lock up 3 million people without trial you’re going to be running a completely unmanageable version of the Stanford prison experiment and cause horrendous unjust suffering. This wasn’t guaranteed in Iraq if we’d have understood the country had such serious internal divisions when we went it.
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The example I'm aware of is that the toilet seats needed to be a specific shape to fit in a specific aircraft, and that they only needed 1XX of them. The $20,000 price tag is because they had to pay for molds, testing, various other fixed costs required to operate, etc.
This article talking about this sells it as they managed to get the cost down through 3D printing, I'm absolutely willing to bet it cost the Airforce way more than contracting it out. The cost of a commercial 3d printer with security, to autocad it up, training staff, sending people into the field to measure it. To have a trained air force employee designing toilet seats is questionable, is that what the military sho…
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The article is mostly weird kremlinology of what the chinese leadership are up to. Which seems unnecessary if they're widely publishing 5 year plans that tell you what they're doing. Similar to Tesla's secret plan to produce cheaper and cheaper vehicles at larger scale, the boring truth isn't a big click winner.
Most people, especially in the west, aren’t reading Chinese 5 year plans very closely.
[1] https://www.librariaeminescu.ro/ro/isbn/606-020-215-8/Vlad-P...
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> Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value. And where is that happening? It's not happening in the US, China or Europe. The ad tech segment would be luc…
> It's not happening in the US, China or Europe. T In Germany, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon compete for CS, electrical, and mech eng students with BMW, Daimler, Audi, Airbus, etc. These classical engineering companies can't compete with FAANG salaries here. The top of my class had offers from many of them, but they all ended up in FAANG, because the salaries were 2x what the others were offering, with larger ro…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article talking about this sells it as they managed to get the cost down through 3D printing, I'm absolutely willing to bet it cost the Airforce way more than contracting it out. The cost of a commercial 3d printer with security, to autocad it up, training staff, sending people into the field to measure it. To have a trained air force employee designing toilet seats is questionable, is that what the military sho…
The $10,000 toilets predated usable 3D printers
The US government and military do plenty of things badly, and plenty of things well, and practically none of the people discussing them have any idea what either category actually contains.